30 December 2013

On early success and adjusting expectations.

What happens when you get a big book deal, and then your sales are good – really good for a debut, totally solid, with a starred review and good reviews overall – but they are not good enough? They are not bestseller numbers? Maybe you get a new paperback cover and another tour and another chance. But maybe the numbers still aren’t good enough. And then things change.

You begin the hard work of adjusting your expectations, which got wildly inflated by all that lovely optimistic talk at the beginning. But once you get certain things – even if they aren’t even things you wanted at first! – you want to keep having them. It hurts your feelings when they stop happening, even though you tell yourself that this is a business and feelings should not matter.

Ready for a digression? Reading this post made me think of all of those young Olympians—figure skaters and gymnasts, mainly, because those are the sports I at least sporadically follow—who hit the top of their field at such a young age. Because when I watch them, I always wonder what will happen to them later. It just seems like it would be really hard to have all that glory so early on, because how would "regular" life compare?

Obviously, Spotswood is talking about a very different situation—on the plus side, writing can be a life-long pursuit, unlike sports like figure skating or gymnastics (at least at the Olympic level)—but there are parallels. It's tough stuff, regardless, and she wrote about a difficult, not-often-openly-discussed aspect of the book world with grace, humility, bravery, and honesty. Definitely worth a read and a mull.